


but thunder never killed

by alpacas



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-14 23:31:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20609147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacas/pseuds/alpacas
Summary: She hadn’t known she was afraid of rain.She’s not afraid of rain.She just. She doesn’t like it. It’s different.





	but thunder never killed

**Author's Note:**

> prompted by an anon to write something about nott's fear of water as a fear of rain, which is both canon and HORRIBLY TRAGIC, hi

1.

She doesn’t like the rain. Doesn’t like it dripping through the roof at night, dripping and dampening her blankets, her socks, her hair. The time Yeza tried to patch the roof himself, almost fell, could have died, while she watched from the garden, pregnant, heavy.

It rained the day you were born, her parents used to tell her. Rained and rained. The first true storm of autumn. The middle of the harvest. Muddy boots, wet leaves. Fall means harvests and plenty and grain and meat. Fall means frost and decay. Be ready. Worse is coming.

Worse be here soon.

2.

Yeza likes storms. Being inside, being dry and warm, the thrill of lightning, the thunder that makes the candles tremble. Likes to read by windows. Watching. Eating stews. They’d had a cat. It hadn’t had a name. It had fled from thunder, and it had been Veth’s job to crawl under the bed, look behind the trunk or in the basement for it.

She’s never mentioned it to Caleb. The cat. He’d want to know the name and sex and coat and she had never been too fond of it. It would hide in the basement when it was scared. It would bother her when she sewed. She’d looked for it back in Felderwin, but it was gone. Not in the basement, not behind the chair. Just gone. Fled away.

It hadn’t obeyed, not like Frumpkin. The way Caleb tells it to lie on her like a scarf, like no real cat, the way it kneads and purrs and licks at her neck for miles in the tunnels. They enter a cavern where water drip drip drips from the rocky ceiling. A drop hits her eye. She flinches. The cat purrs. Caleb watches her from five feet behind.

Caleb likes storms. Likes reading by candlelight. The hum of electricity. They’d camped a lot, the two of them. He’d complained and found them shelter and then watched from under some tree or some collapsed shed. His eyes wide and awestruck. From the brightness; the power.

It isn’t like Nott’s scared of lightning. She’s just…

She’s just.

She’d liked that Caleb and Yeza had that in common. It had felt like a sign. She’d been desperate for them, those first few weeks.

3.

She hadn’t known she was afraid of rain.

She’s _not_ afraid of rain.

She just. She doesn’t like it. It’s different.

The first storm in the goblin camp, they’d all huddled in tents, under tarps. Nott had tried to push her way in, into the warmth and stench of bodies. Been pushed back out. She wasn’t very high in the camp hierarchy. Huddled and shivered in the driest spot under one of the trees, water in her hair, her eyes, her nose, her mou—

Pushed and burrowed and forced her way back, back into the tree, against the bark, shoulders scraping and skinning, pick pick picking at her fingertips, her nails, then the cuticles, then the skin, until the storm had broken.

It wasn’t the rain. It was —

The goblins made fun of her. Praised her in a tongue she only half knew. At last, you don’t smell like trash, they’d teased, using a word that could also translate as _halfling_.

4.

By the time she met Caleb, she tried not to let on. Sure that if he knew, that if he knew she could be laid low by something so — well, he’d go on without her, wouldn’t he? And who could blame him? And then he’d fall into a pit and die, and where would he be? So best — best for everyone. If she doesn’t let on that she’s so — silly — and he never finds out and leaves her for it.

Jump to: camping. A spring storm. Caleb, excited, his face younger and awake, telling her: here is how you count. Here is how you know how far the storm is. One — two —

(Eins. Zwei.)

She’d smiled. Grimaced. Nodded. Sat on her hands, bit at her cheeks. Her hood up. Her cloak pulled over her shoulders. Not too bad, not too terrible, so long as it doesn’t get in her eyes or ears or mouth or throat, so long as her fingers don’t start to itch and twitch and search for phantom rope — but she still gets wet. Damp. Cold. Moldy.

The storm is getting closer, Caleb announces.

The storm is getting farther away, he says.

She breathes through her nose. She learns to count. Ten seconds. Twelve seconds. Eighteen. The rain slows and fades away. Caleb, soaked to the bone, sits beside her. She doesn’t flinch away.

5.

It rains and Molly sprawls out under the cart, and Nott joins him. She doesn’t want him to say anything and she’s relieved when he doesn’t. Picks a spot so they’ll both have their privacy and curls up on her cloak. It’s muddy. It smells. Of her own sweat and the wet earth and horse and BO and mud. She presses her face into her cloak. She listens to the rain. To the trickling of water. Her pulse so fast her breathing matches it. She thinks Molly is watching her. Judging her probably. Thinking: what a child, what a stupid girl, afraid of water, so useless, so stupid, always such a —

Waste.

She wants —

Her bed. The quilts and the sagging feather base of it, somehow both understuffed and lumpy. Yeza snoring softly. Luc snoring wet in her arms. Caleb, counting the seconds, his coat sodden and smelly and warm.

She twists her hair. Untwists. Braids. Unbraids. Sits up. Sits back down. Leans against one of the wheels and falls into a fitful sleep, where she counts and counts but the water only rises. Help, she says. Don’t worry, Caleb says, pointing. They’re moving away.

Who? Yeza or the goblins? But she can’t ask: her mouth is full of water.

She wakes up in the mud. Shivering. Soaked. Molly lying asleep on his back, his arms folded over his chest. It’s morning, it’s sunny. She finds Caleb and presses herself against him. He asks her a question she doesn’t answer.

6.

It rains at sea. And that’s the _worst_ kind, the worst rain of all. The ship tossing and shaking and the sailors muttering anxiously, Fjord vanishing to eat some eyes or yell orders or something, something stupid, something Nott hates to pray to him for. Caleb tries to urge her belowdecks, but she stays at the rail. In the lashing rain. If she dies, she wants to see it coming. Clenching the wood until her fingers claw divots.

Jester comes and finds her. Nott kind of expects Jessie will just — just be prancing around, spinning, not noticing they’re all about to get murdered. But Jester walks carefully also, sits down on the deck next to Nott, in the little niche she’s found herself, between deck and cabin and barrels, where she can almost pretend she’s not on a ship but still see the rising waves.

“Do you think we’ll be okay?” Jester asks, half whispering.

“No. Don’t be stupid. We’re gonna die.”

They’re holding hands.

“I don’t think it’s as bad as it was last night, though.”

“It doesn’t matter. Have you seen —“ just then, a crack of lightning.

Jester makes a little squeak of surprised fear.

Nott counts. Thunder.

“I don’t like big storms like this.”

Don’t be silly. You’re fine. You’re not afraid of much, Jessie. Don’t think I’ve never noticed. Normal things like dragons, but compared to me? I’m afraid of: strangers, talking, laughter, goblins, orcs, wolves, sharks, yaun-ti, snakes, traps, rabies, dragons, cabinets, humans, elves, tieflings, gods, demons, lightning, thunder, water, being sober, being alive, being dead, monsters. Mirrors. Waves.

“This is nothing,” Nott says. “I think it’s passing anyway. Caleb taught me how to count for lightning.” She tells Jester. They count together. Jester holds her hand, squeezes it each wave and burst of lightning. Nott keeps her eyes open for the last couple. A little. Squinting sideways at Jester’s calm expression, her anticipatory smile.

7.

It rains again.

Pours.

She pulls her mask up, to keep it out of her mouth, off her lips and teeth and neck. Keeps her head down and hood up. Nothing for it; they have to make time.

She picks at a little stray bit of nail, picks it down to base and hot skin, but her skin is wet and she can’t get a grip on the last few shards. The hot heat of it. The bright pain. Her nose drips. Her stupid fucking nose ring catches the water, drips it onto the top of her lip. She tugs at it. Twitches. Almost yanks it out, skin damned, blood damned, the water acrid and sour and her fingers humming with a hot, infected pain —

A hand on her shoulder. She flinches and she yelps.

Caleb’s grip loosens because she’s offended him, and now he’s mad at her, and now he’s going to stop talking to her and not want to be friends and she goes white hot and scared, opens her mouth to joke it off but there’s rain and there’s water.

Jester calls over just then: “Nott! Do you want to borrow my cloak? It would look really pretty with your new dress, I was thinking, I think. Do you want it?”

She doesn’t ask, just drapes it over Nott’s head like a shawl.

Caleb pulls his hand away.

8.

It snows while they wait for Fjord’s new sword to get made. Nott stands outside in it. Snow is frozen water. She catches a few flakes and watches them melt. Kicks it around a bit. Builds a snow-ling and pelts it with a dozen snowballs. It’s frozen water. It doesn’t send her — it doesn’t make her feel anything at all.

Caleb comes to find her. She gets him in the shoulder, and only because she missed his face on purpose. He smiles and tosses one back. It goes wide, but not by too much. “That was really good!” she assures him.

“It is rather pretty, isn’t it?” he says, looking around, healthy color in his cheeks. “It would snow when I was growing up, but rarely quite this much.”

“Never in Felderwin,” she says, going back to making snowballs for a future ambush round.

“Are you alright?”

She thinks he means about their talk the other day, and she doesn’t know what to say.

“It’s snowing — pretty hard.”

“My ring keeps me above it pretty well,” she says. Indeed: she normally comes up to about Caleb’s waist, but she’s rib high right now, and it’s kind of nice. She doesn’t mind being a normal, proper size. But it would be nice if all her friends weren’t giants.

“I meant — that it is falling. You will get — wet. From the melting snow.”

She catches his meaning. “It’s — it’s snow. It’s not, you know, water.”

They both think about science for a moment. Matter. Chemistry.

“You struggle when it rains,” Caleb says.

“Mmmm,” she says. Something long and non-committal.

“It took me a long time to notice. I did not notice. You hid it well. And that is of course — fair. That’s something I understand. But —“

“Caleb,” she says. Because if she doesn’t, he’ll keep talking. Keep apologizing and justifying and saying it’s all okay to convince himself of the fact. “It’s okay. I — some things, it’s okay if it’s _not_ okay. I’m not okay — with water. And that’s fine. You don’t have to apologize.”

He starts making snowballs. Alongside her.

“No,” he says after a moment. “But I can apologize. For being a poor friend. I did not know, and when I knew, I was afraid to — say anything about it. For fear of upsetting you. Of making you angry with me.”

She thinks back. To sheds and camping in ditches. Biting her cheeks until they bled. “Oh, well,” she says flippantly, as much as she can.

“Jester knew.”

“Jester’s an ace detective,” she reminds him.

“Ja, well, she’s very — she is a clever one. But I…”

“Oh, you’re still _much_ smarter than she is; you’re the smartest one of all of us by a _lot_, don’t worry, Caleb.”

“I am — we are _best friends_, and so I should — I will be a better one. To you.”

She’s flattered and her throat is tight and hot. “Sure,” she manages, snow loose and crumbling in her fingers. “Okay.”

9.

It rains. Not very hard. She has her hood and for once it’s enough. Spring rain, she remembers. Good for seeds. For earth. Growth and life and plants. Warm and gentle. Smells like fresh grass.

Jester walks next to her and tells her a funny story about a recent prank. Caleb holds her hand even though she doesn’t need him to. She doesn’t say so.

Some things are okay as they are.


End file.
